Wood Carvers Break Chains of Tradition

Southern California’s woodcarvers whittled quietly most of the day Sunday at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center.

And while all that whittling was going on, Vern Fields and B.G. Hickman sat still and looked bored.

Among 170 exhibitors at the first regional show of the California Carvers Guild, the two Ojai artists had come to demonstrate the little-known technique of chain-saw sculpture.

Fields and Hickman cut eagles, Indians and porpoises out of sections of tree trunk, fashioning the form entirely with gasoline-powered chain saws, then finishing off with power disk sanders, like the ones used in auto body shops.

That’s why they were ordered to stop working.

As the show wound down, however, the organizers allowed Hickman a short dispensation to pose for a photograph digging his speeding saw blade into a two-foot length of ash that had been frozen in time as an incomplete eagle taking wing.

He put on a hearing protector and fired up. Chips began to fly. Amazingly fine details began to take form. A crowd gathered to watch.

“Hope his chain breaks,” said John Cridelich, a wildlife carver from Santa Maria, who was displaying his wood-burned duck decoys.

“Not only the noise, the smell,” Cridelich said. “It gets pretty heavy in here after a while.”

Hickman shut down after a few minutes. A slender man with gray hair and beard, dressed in blue denims, he looked more like a cowboy than an artist.

He started using a chain saw mainly to increase his production but found that the unusual technique altered his style.

“It kind of frees you up,” he said. “Actually, you have to think quicker.”

Down the way sat Fields with the look of a self-satisfied ex-Marine, chain saw at rest on his thigh.

He entertained one inquirer with stories of the self-inflicted wounds chain-saw sculptors are subject to.

“I saw a guy with stair steps down his forehead,” he said. “It can mess you up real good.”

Fields said chain-saw sculpture has been around since Homelite sold its first chain saw. It isn’t for everybody. But he knew it was the only thing for him. In 1980 he quit trucking and decided to reproduce the images that had filled his head out on the road.

“I saw those big trees and I used to see grizzly bears,” he said. “People said, ‘You’re crazy.’ ”

But he’s done it. His most majestic eagle was on sale for $1,500.

Fields said that is its workingman’s price, not its real worth.

“I don’t charge for the art,” he said. “Everything I charge is labor.”

Just like a good mechanic, his rate is $35 an hour.

Some of his works have immediately turned a profit for the purchaser, he boasted.

“Don’t bother me,” Fields said. “As long as I can make my price and put beans on the table, that’s all I’m interested in.”